Matteo Spada

Biographical Summary

Matteo received his Master in physics at the University of Bologna (Italy) in 2005. Between mid 2005 and mid 2006 he worked at the Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia (INGV), Rome as researcher in the topic of the crustal imaging. In November 2006 he started his PhD at the Swiss Seismological Service (SED), ETH Zurich. In his PhD thesis he worked in the context of a cross-disciplinary project on improving the ability to conduct tsunami and seismic hazard studies and to perform seismic imaging. Matteo completed his PhD in August 2011, and worked since then as a Post Doctoral researcher at SED on the same topics as in his thesis. Since January 2013, Matteo joined the Technology Assessment (TA) group of the Laboratory for Energy Systems Analysis (LEA) at the Paul Scherrer Institut (PSI) as a risk analyst.

SCCER-SoE Responsibilities

His primarily research interests are the comparative analysis of severe accident risk in the energy sector, and its relevance in the broader context of sustainability, energy security, critical infrastructure protection, and decision support; the risk of rare but severe accidents related to production and consumption of energy; the uncertainty estimation in the context of accident risk assessment. Other interests include spatio-temporal models for accident risk assessment; the support of decision-making processes with tools such as Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA). Matteo is also one of the responsible for the update and extensions of PSI’s database ENSAD (Energy-Related Severe Accident Database). In the context of SCCER-SoE he is involved in the Risk Governance part. His main research will be on the assessment of accident risk for all type of geoenergy (e.g., geothermal) and hydropower.